


At World's End

by FailingTheTest



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen, Inspired by a Nightmare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-11-01 15:26:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10924668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FailingTheTest/pseuds/FailingTheTest
Summary: Even outside the Framework, Daisy finds out nothing is quite as it seems.





	At World's End

**Author's Note:**

> This scenario woke me up from a deep sleep a couple nights ago. Why am I sharing it? Misery loves company, I guess.
> 
> I guess technically you could call this speculation for the season four finale.

Daisy sat back and sighed in relief as Ophelia’s smoldering remains slipped from the Ghost Rider’s fiery phalanges. She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, carefully stretching abused muscles and testing the functionality of various body parts, _I can’t believe that worked_ , she thought bemusedly. She sucked in another lungful of air, then opened her eyes and glanced around to check on her team. 

About a dozen yards to her left, Coulson was bent over May, her head in his lap as he gently probed her battered ribcage to assess the damage. Satisfied the two senior agents were okay for the moment, Daisy twisted further to her left, then back to the right, trying to get a good look at FitzSimmons, sitting about twenty feet directly behind her.

The scientists took more hits than Daisy had counted on when she’d hastily sketched out her plan, but neither seemed to be in immediate danger. She doubted anybody short of a super-soldier could pry them apart at the moment, anyway.

“Why not?” Daisy whipped her head back around to face front, startled by the question.

She blinked up at Robbie, back to looking like a normal human now that the Rider had retreated. “Why not what?”

“You said ‘I can’t believe that worked’,” he explained, reaching down to offer her a hand up. “So why can’t you believe it?”

Daisy allowed him to pull her up, taking a moment to steady herself before replying. “Because it was a _stupid_ plan,” she told him with a grimace.

Robbie just grinned at her. “Hey, if it’s stupid and it works ...” he trailed off, waiting for her to finish the saying.

 _... then it’s not stupid,_ her mind supplied automatically. Daisy shook her head at him instead. “No. If it’s stupid and it works, it’s -”

“- still stupid,” a new voice finished acerbically. Daisy spun quickly to her right, throwing both hands up in case she needed to quake whoever the hell had sneaked up on ...

“ _Fury_? What the hell are _you_ doing here?” she demanded angrily, pointing both hands at the eye-patch-and-leather-coat wearing fugitive former director.

“Your final evaluation, Agent Johnson,” Fury replied cryptically. When Daisy only glared a question at him, he rolled his eye in exasperation. “Simulation concluded. Open your eyes, Agent.”

* * *

“What the hell, Nick?” Daisy shouted, eyes squinted mostly shut against the fluorescent glare as she struggled up to a sitting position in the lab’s hospital-style bed. “I thought you said it was a training simulation!”

Fury only raised a finger, then turned to usher a handful of techs out of the room before shutting and locking the door behind them. Only then did he turn back to face her. “It was,” he told her calmly, “and you aced it - like I knew you would.”

Daisy smirked when she realized the master spy was still standing a good five paces clear of her. _Not far enough, Nick_. She twisted to get her feet on the floor so she could press the issue - and promptly collapsed as her knees refused to support her weight.

Fury was suddenly right next to her, lifting her back into the bed with surprising gentleness. “You should probably take it easy,” he half-growled at her.

“How long was I in there?” she asked after she recovered from the sudden exertion of falling on her ass.

“A little over two months,” came the prompt reply.

Daisy shook her head, her real memories suddenly clashing with the lifetime of memories FitzSimmons’ training program had provided for her. _Wait -_ she shot a searching glance around the room. “Were FitzSimmons in there with me? I thought you said it was just going to be me and the instructor.”

Fury shook his head. “No. They set it up, but they’ve got too many irons in the fire to take a two-month nap.” She waited a few seconds to see if he would elaborate, but he just looked her steadily in the eye, face a barely blinking mask.

“What’s got you so nervous, Fury?” she asked, trying to keep her own unease out of her voice. His undamaged eye twitched - slightly. Maybe she’d imagined it, but she’d had simulated years of experience with May’s non-expressions, so she just raised one eyebrow a couple millimeters and stared back at the Director.

Who promptly cracked, after a mere three minutes of silence. “Shit,” he muttered and looked away. “I was afraid of this,” he explained after he looked back to find her eyebrow another millimeter higher.

“What? You think your hand-picked trainer screwed up?” she joked, trying to counter the growing sense of dread pulling in around her.

“I think it’s time you met him in person,” Fury told her, his face more mask-like than ever.

* * *

Fury had refused to say anything more, even as he got Daisy situated in a wheelchair and then personally guided it through the corridors of the underground facility. They passed through a half-dozen checkpoints and twice as many biometric-secured doors before he brought the chair to a halt in front of yet another blank keypad-equipped door.

Nick started to say something, then closed his mouth with a tiny head shake and turned to enter the code

Daisy kept her questions to herself as the Director rolled her through the door, glancing around to find a room very similar to the one she’d just spent the last two months in. There was considerably more medical support equipment, however, all of it clustered around a single bed.

“ _Coulson_?” Daisy hated the quaver in her voice, but the frail body - kept alive by the machines ringed around him - was so utterly unlike the man in her memories. She reached out even before Fury maneuvered her close alongside the bed, and she couldn’t look away from Coulson’s pale face as Nick tried to explain.

“We set some parameters for training, but with the exception of FitzSimmons and yourself, everybody in the simulation is based on Phil Coulson’s memories.”

“So Hand, Garret, Sitwell ... all those agents at the Hub and Slingshot?”

“All of them are - or were - SHIELD agents Coulson knew or met over the years,” Fury confirmed.

“Even the Koenigs?” Daisy asked, startling herself with a harsh chuckle.

“Especially them,” he agreed with a snort of his own.

She tried to hold on to the amusement of imagining Sam and Billy sniping at each other, but her thoughts kept sliding to another set of memories. “What about May?” she heard herself ask, before she’d even consciously formed the thought.

“She was a Specialist, Phil’s partner before -”

“Bahrain.”

“Before whatever happened in Bahrain,” Fury agreed, and something in his tone tore Daisy’s eyes off Coulson at last.

“You don’t know?”

“She never told anybody.”

“W-what?”

“Melinda May was working an Admin desk in the Triskelion the day Hydra tried to launch the Insight carriers. _Six years_ out of the field and she still dropped a pair of traitors - barehanded - when Cap blew the lid off. Then killed at least eight more in the process of getting her officemates out of the building.

“Soon as they got clear, she led a scratch-built team of newbies and retreads back into the fight. Nobody saw her come out before the building came down.”

* * *

There were dozens of fires he needed to be pissing on, five high-priority ops that were scheduled to go down in the next forty eight hours, and literally hundreds of leads on possible threats that he wanted to get his eye on. 

But Fury just stood behind his hand-picked rookie, and let Daisy grieve for the loss of a world that never was.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry it's so rough, wanted to get it out before 4x22 destroyed what little I could remember after I woke up.


End file.
